How to Improve Gut Health to Unlock a Healthier You

Our health is so important for successful adulting. We don’t perform at our best if we’re feeling tired, sore, or meh. It’s no surprise then that many of us are on the lookout for ways to improve our health. One absolutely vital and underappreciated way we can improve our general health is by boosting our gut health.

In fact, 70% of our immune system is in our gut. If we don’t have a healthy gut, it’s almost impossible to function at our best. An unhealthy gut can lead to more frequent and longer infections, slower healing time, weight gain, breakouts, and so much more. I am personally super interested in this topic because, as someone with Celiac’s Disease, my gut health is at a disadvantage.

In this post, I’ll discuss why your gut is so important for your health. I’ll then talk about practical, actionable steps you can take to improve your gut health. By implementing a few of these steps, I hope you too notice an improvement in your health and wellbeing.

Why Is Gut Health So Important?

As mentioned above, 70% of our immune system is in our gut. The gut plays such an important role in our immune system, in part, because it houses a lot of the good bacteria in our body. Good bacteria helps instruct our immune cells and tells them when to attack and what cells to attack.

Without a healthy microbiome, our immune system may not mount a strong enough response to illness. Alternatively, it may attack cells it doesn’t need to, like our own healthy cells. This is what happens with autoimmune disorders. Having an immune system without a healthy gut is sort of like having a classroom of students with no teacher. Things can run rampant.

How Does Gut Health Deteriorate?

So your gut health is key. However, few of us know whether our gut health is good or bad. It’s not like our blood pressure or weight where we get it checked regularly and easily. You can check your gut health by purchasing at-home tests or by doing a doctor-ordered lab test. These tests generally involve a stool sample. So, again, not quite as easy (or clean!) a process as stepping on a scale!

You can also get clues into your gut health by reflecting on your diet and behaviors. Both diet and behavior play a big role in gut health and if we’re not optimizing either, our gut health is likely to be less than optimal as well. Specifically, the following behaviors/experiences tend to harm our guts:

• Stress
• Taking antibiotics
• Lack of sleep
• Smoking
• Drinking alcohol
• A sedentary lifestyle
• Eating lots of processed and/or fried food
• Eating too much animal protein, especially red meat
• Consuming too little fiber
• Gastrointestinal illnesses and other illnesses that affect your gut like Celiac’s, colitis, etc.

How Do You Improve Gut Health?

Luckily, you can also improve your gut health through a variety of steps. It’s important to adopt as many of these steps as you can because they positively impact your health in a wide range of ways.

Consume Probiotics with Lots of Live and Active Cultures

One of the most obvious steps we can take to improve our gut bacteria is to consume probiotics. Probiotic foods contain live and active bacterial cultures. Consequently, they can increase the population size and diversity of good bacteria. Unfortunately, many products advertise themselves as probiotics but are not actually helpful for your gut.

For the greatest effectiveness, you want to look for products that specifically say they have “live and active” cultures and require refrigeration. Because heat kills bacteria, processed/shelf-stable products are more likely to not actually have live bacteria. And dead bacteria won’t help you a whole lot.

Also look for the number of colony-forming units (CFU). This tells you the number of bacterial colonies you’ll get in a given amount of food. You want to look for foods that have CFUs of 1 billion or more. Also, look for products that have Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, Bacillus or Saccharomyces boulardii as those are the most well-researched probiotics.

You’re more likely to find all of these qualities in natural food sources like yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, tempeh, and miso.

Eat Prebiotics

As noted above, we want to consume live and active bacterial cultures. However, if we want to keep our bacteria alive, we need to feed them. Luckily, that’s pretty easy to do since bacteria feed off of fiber. Fibrous foods are sometimes called prebiotics.

So to get the most bang for your buck, make sure you are consuming probiotics and prebiotics like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains that contain lots of fiber.

Eat a Wide Range of Unprocessed, Whole Foods

Nutrients like Vitamin C, Vitamin D, healthy fats, fiber, and more all support a healthy gut. We best absorb these nutrients through foods rather than supplements. Consequently, eating a wide range of foods can ensure we are getting enough vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients.

Also, try to eat these foods in their whole forms rather than just through smoothies or juices. Juices don’t have fiber. While smoothies do have fiber, blenders chop up the insoluble fiber in fruits and veggies into tiny pieces. This is bad news because, in its non-chopped up form, insoluble fiber blends with soluble fibers in fruits and veggies to make a gel. That gel helps slow down the pace at which your body absorbs sugar, limiting blood sugar spikes. By chopping up that fiber, blenders make that fiber less effective.

As a result, both smoothies and juices spike your blood sugar. Plus, liquid is more quickly digested than whole foods, meaning you’ll feel hungry faster after a smoothie or, especially, juice than if you ate each of those ingredients on their own. Smoothies and juices are better than no fruits and veggies at all. However, if you can, eat those fruits and veggies whole more often.

Recipes for Improving Gut Health

So how do you integrate all these diet recommendations? Personally, I love the following recipes for improving gut health:

• This Kimchi Tofu soup is so easy to make and delicious! Plus it has probiotics and prebiotics in the kimchi, healthy protein, and ginger, which is great for gut health. I can never find daikon, so I use jicama which is delicious. I also have trouble finding GF gochujang, so I leave it out and it still turns out really well.
• Plain yogurt with berries and a teaspoon of honey or maple syrup (or to taste). I prefer plain whole milk yogurt, which is satiating and has healthy fats.
• Chia seed pudding with 1/2 cup yogurt, 1/2 cup unsweetened almond milk, 1 tsp maple syrup, 3 tablespoons chia seeds, and a dash of cinnamon. Mix together in an airtight container. Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight. Top with berries.
• Yogurt/Peanut Butter Dip. I eat this with apple slices for a delicious snack or light meal. Eating this dip with chopped fruit is awesome because it combines those fibrous prebiotics with the probiotics in the yogurt.
• Kale Radicchio Salad with Lemon Miso Dressing. This recipe is one of my all-time favorite salad recipes. My partner Andrew hates kale, but he actually loves this recipe. It has probiotics in the miso and parmesan and prebiotics in the kale and radicchio. Garlic is also great for your gut. I choose to leave out the radicchio (that s*** is expensive!) and just use more kale. I also use wild rice instead of farro to make it GF.

For even easier options, keep kimchi and/or sauerkraut on hand and use them to top burgers, sandwiches, soups, etc. Try using plain yogurt in place of sour cream. And add yogurt to smoothies. Just avoid cooking foods with probiotics or you’ll undo much of their benefit.

Avoid Unnecessary Prescriptions

You should always, always take prescriptions that are prescribed by a doctor. I am certainly not suggesting you should forego life-saving and -supporting medicine. However, many of us have been in situations where we wanted a doctor to prescribe medication “just in case.” Or perhaps we went to the doctor with very minor symptoms hoping to kick an illness more quickly with antibiotics. This is frequently the case with viral infections. Antibiotics don’t kill viruses. Yet, we often ask to be prescribed medications for viruses.

The problem with this is that even a single round of antibiotics that target bacterial illnesses can dramatically lower both our good and bad levels of bacteria. While good bacteria levels do rebound, they often don’t rebound to the levels exhibited before you took antibiotics. So in the long-term, our immune system may actually be harmed by those antibiotics.

Consequently, only take prescription medications when they are necessary and prescribed by a doctor. For both health and ethical reasons, do not try to convince a doctor to give you medication if they don’t think it will be helpful for your situation.

Get 7-9 Hours of Sleep

We all know that sleep is super important for our health. However, few people realize how much sleep they need. In particular, women underestimate the sleep they should get. This is understandable because, until recently, many sleep studies relied on all-male participants. Recent research shows that women need more sleep than men. In fact, many women need closer to 9 hours per night than the usually cited 7-8 hours.

So if your immune system and/or gut don’t feel up to snuff, make sure you get enough sleep. You can check out my tips for sleeping if you need a little guidance.

Exercise Regularly

Ideally, we should all get 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. That can include things like walking, biking, swimming, and even mowing the lawn. Strength training is also key for our health and longevity. I have 10-minute workouts for beginners that cover upper-body, lower-body, and core exercises. You can also find posts about using resistance bands and strength training.

Exercise positively impacts tons of bodily functions. One of those bodily functions is our gut health. Exercise impacts our gut through a few different pathways. First, it reduces the “transit time” of food in our body. Basically that’s a fancy way of saying it reduces the time between when we eat something and *ahem* excrete it out. This makes for a healthier digestive tract and reduces the risk of things like constipation.

Exercise also lowers inflammation and increases antioxidant levels. Inflammation and oxidation put stress on our bodies. By reducing and preventing those things, exercise helps our bodies focus on healing and thriving.

Manage Stress

We’ve all heard how bad stress is for us. It’s enough to make anyone stress about being stressed. Why is it so bad? For one thing, stress increases that inflammation and oxidation I just mentioned. Your body treats mental and physical stress the same. So stress really isn’t just in your head. Consequently, stress can put a big demand on your body that redirects its attention from preventing illness, healing wounds, etc.

On top of that, there are a variety of hormones that influence and are influenced by stress like adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. These hormones also impact our body’s ability to absorb nutrients and digest food. Stress may also impact the population size and diversity of bacteria in our body and disrupt our body’s ability to recognize good bacteria from bad.

This isn’t even a complete list of how stress impacts the gut. Nevertheless, it helps illustrate why stress is bad. A few of the most well-established ways to reduce stress are through sleep and exercise (kill two birds with one stone!), therapy, and socializing with loved ones. Journaling, meditation, setting boundaries at work, and limiting social media/device time are also helpful.

Are Supplements Helpful or Necessary?

Many influencers tout the value of supplements for improving gut health. However, are those supplements actually effective? So far, the research is inconclusive. Small studies found that ginger and the non-essential amino acid glutamine improved gut bacteria. However, there isn’t enough evidence to say for sure. And plenty of studies on other kinds of supplements have found little to no evidence for their helpfulness.

This doesn’t stop supplement companies from making big claims about their products’ health benefits. Because supplements aren’t regulated by the FDA, supplements can advertise themselves as super helpful while having little to no evidence to support their claims. Plus, if you are using supplements to replace whole foods like fruits, vegetables, and food sources of probiotics, you might actually be doing more harm than good.

If you have the money to do so, feel free to try supplements. However, make sure you continue to eat plenty of fiber, probiotics, and diverse foods. And make sure you study up on the product and user reviews to make sure the company uses safe ingredients and processes.

Final Thoughts on Gut Health

We are what we eat. And it turns out we also fight illnesses and heal like we eat. Our gut is pivotal for our immune system and overall health and wellbeing. From fighting infections to clearing our skin, our gut almost literally does it all. So it’s important to support it with healthy behaviors. Eating well, exercising regularly, getting good sleep, and managing our stress will get us a long way there.

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful and informative! If you did, please consider liking, subscribing, or sharing with others. It’s always a huge help! Interested in related content? Check out my posts on hormone-balancing diets, anti-inflammatory diets, and the best wedding diet and workout plan to empower you.